Additional Artist Creations:

Artists Inspiration:

Robert has built his growing reputation for making sculptures, large to small out of plastic toys of every description; from recognizable cartoon characters including the Simpsons, Batman and Dennis the Menace, to plastic guns, guitars and swords. Using worthless mass produced plastic is not a new medium for artists Ė Tony Cragg used it in the early 1980ís when was making wall collages from found plastic. But Robert does not use the plastic as flat decoration like Cragg; he uses it to create sculptures and installations, which stand-alone. Robert has found that all these toys are strong enough to be screwed to a wooden armature and he can build any shape or form he wants. The visible screw heads add a further detail to the sculpture. The completed sculptures are usually figurative. What is so clever about these sculptures is that the toys still follow the forms. There is a serious comment that lies beneath the use of toys as artistís materials and they raise certain questions. Are children being subjected to mass marketing images from such an early age they are preconditioned to recognise the stereotypes before they have encountered different people from different cultures? Are guns for boys and dolls for girls just another way of preconditioning children and does the toy gun lead to the use of real guns? How much oil and other raw materials are being used to make these short lived non-degradable distractions? and the scale on which they are produced, will they be found in future as the only evidence of our civilization?